Far and away the quickest way I’ve found to save code I reuse often is even simpler than all that. And I’m about to clue you in on it.

If you’ve been to BUILD or other conferences/presentations by Microsoft folk, you’ve undoubtedly seen them take their “sample code” and insert it via a snippet. But what I saw at BUILD 2014 this past April surprised me. All the presenters had the toolbox open *in code view* and were simply dragging & dropping code snippets from the toolbox right in to their code window. Every time they did it, they did so fast that I wasn’t even able to see exactly where things were coming from or what they looked like.

This past week I was preparing for a presentation and decide to just give something a whirl:

I got my code all ready in my sample app, and highlighted it. Then I got an idea… what if…

Sure enough, just dragging the code over to the toolbox gives you a little ‘text’ entry in your toolbox. You can even rename it so you know what you’re going to use it for:

Now, when you want to use it again, you just drag that toolbox item back in to your code:

And boom, it appears.

Insanely useful for doing live-code presentations, or storing away snippets you use over and over without the hassle of actually writing a snippet.

The best part? These items persist across VS launches; they’ll be there the next time you launch Visual Studio